


The Art of Remembrance

by PetrichorPerfume



Series: The Art of the Fallen [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Blasphemy, Fallen Lucifer, Lucifer's Fall, M/M, Michael's Fall, no happy ending, sin - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2519462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrichorPerfume/pseuds/PetrichorPerfume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael forgets Lucifer slowly, and by degrees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Remembrance

Michael forgets Lucifer slowly, and by degrees. Not his Grace – never his Grace; never that ethereal, majestic, magnificent shock of pure, radiant, _resplendent_ white – not the way his brother felt against him in the dark, humid, lush spaces between the newly minted mountains where no one else dared to venture, not the way that perfect voice cracked on the second syllable of “I love you, brother.”

 

No, he forgets the very name – Lucifer, _lux_ , _lucis_ , _Luce,_ full of light and things like joy and love and _passion_ – and with it, everything else that ever mattered, everything else he ever loved, everything beyond the sweet, slick, sliding _sin_ of Lucifer’s soul against his.

 

“We don’t talk about him anymore,” he tells the little angels, the ones old enough to remember Lucifer but not to have _known_ him – not that they could have truly known him the way Michael did, because that was an _honor_ reserved for him and him alone – when they ask why ‘big brother Luci’er’ doesn’t come to down play with them anymore.

 

He tells the littlest angels a different story – a different _lie_ , the part of him that still loves Lucifer, that will never _stop_ loving Lucifer, protests – when they ask of ‘the fallen angel’ their older brothers and sisters keep talking about. (And he’s furious at that, righteously, wrathfully so, because the only other angels he feels have any kind of _right_ to speak of his long-gone brother are similarly lost to him, Gabriel through his cowardly departure and Raphael through his traitorous withdrawal from anything and everything and everyone that isn’t his garden. “He no longer has a name,” he tells them, as if he’d stripped that from Lucifer, too, as if he _could,_ as if it were even possible to dim the Morning Star’s light. ( _And, is it?_ He wonders, later, privately, alone. _When I next see him, will he be dim with ten thousand years of ash and brimstone and abject abhorrence?)_

Slowly (so slowly that he doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s far, far too late), and by degrees, he forgets the languid feel of it on his lips, the dulcet taste of it on his tongue, the way it used to tear itself past his unwilling throat, clamoring for freedom and finding it just as his brother gifted him with a filthy, blasphemous kiss – “ _Lucifer_.”

 

Slowly (so slowly it hurts), and by degrees, he forgets the sound of it. Forgets how musically mellifluous it sounded when he called out in the thick of the chase – “Lucifer.” Forgets how _beautiful_ it was, ringing in the air like a thousand cathedrals, echoing off the little dips in the mountains and hanging gossamer-like, light and thin and airy in the summer twilight – _“Lucifer.”_

 

Slowly (so slowly the mountains he used to love fall back into the molten Earth to be reborn elsewhere and elsewhen to form lusher, greener valleys for someone else to fall in love within), and by degrees, he forgets the very essence of the word. ‘Lucifer’ means nothing to him, not anymore, not now; not ever. (And when he dreams of his long-lost brother, he dreams of light – light; another thing lost to him, for there is no light after the Fall, none at all, no light, and no love.)

 

Slowly (slowly, and by degrees), he forgets the oath he made, long and long ago when the stars were young and so was he. “Without you, brother, there can be no me.”

 

And slowly (so slowly it _burns_ , so slowly the universe has time to be reborn twice over before it’s done, so slowly that the end of the world comes and goes before he understands what happened, as slow as his Fall and slower still), and all at once, Michael loses himself.


End file.
